Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (16 page)

“Everything changed, Saleem. It changed utterly.”

CHAPTER 11

T
he village buried its sons’ bodies. Then it submitted to the orders of the government, whose institutions applied the pressure necessary to rapidly transform it into a normal village like all other Iraqi villages.

“There was some satisfaction in burying Grandfather at the highest point of the cemetery. They put green banners above his tomb, as well as jars of salt for visitors seeking a blessing to lick. The sick would cut strips from the banners at his grave to tie around their necks or forearms, like consecrated amulets. The people were satisfied as to Grandfather’s heavenly reward, he who was considered a blessed man and one of God’s pious saints.

“Relations with Subh were restored in the traditional way. Its people stopped winking to each other at our surname of Qashmar, not out of respect for us but out of fear of the government, which had imposed the name Faris on our village, and which possessed eyes and ears that spied into every corner: on both banks of the river, on both sides of the mountain, on the dry land and the water, in the air and in the mud.

“An atmosphere of war pervaded the entire country. The television, the schools, the party organizations, and the police were all instruments of the government for mobilizing and exercising control. There was iron and fire. There was fear and repression. We gave ourselves over to waiting and to a faint hope in an obscure salvation. It felt like our hope hung by a thread.”

“The people gradually disengaged from Mullah Mutlaq’s domination after his passing. They were brought into submission by the government’s vicious authority. The sessions for religious studies in the mosque were dissolved, as well as the meetings to solve social problems, which were transferred to the city courtrooms. The number of people who prayed got smaller, and no one talked any more about avenging our honor, which they had pledged to the mullah. I didn’t do anything about that. But inside, I held fast to my covenant, which I had pledged by my soul and sworn in front of my father. It was only I who kept living under the authority of the venerable Mutlaq, eagerly maintaining my obedience to that authority, no matter what the cost.

“As far as I was concerned, Saleem, my father was everything to me, everything: the absolute authority in this life and the next. You, yourself, saw my relationship with him, how sacred he was to me. He was history, religion, values, the absolute, and the single existing truth, or else the source of these things. In my eyes, he was the strong, knowledgeable, and completely correct man. Disobeying him was out of the question. He raised me that way from the moment I became conscious. Engraved into my emotions and my makeup was the dictum that ‘God’s satisfaction comes from the satisfaction of parents,’ so his contentment was my greatest goal. Actually, in my eyes, my father was God’s sole deputy on earth. And I confess now, to you alone and for the first time in my life, that I would often
see the Lord incarnated in him. He represented direct divinity for me, according to what his upbringing established in me. I never once, in all the days of my life, dared to look into his eyes.

“One thing alone interfered with that assurance of mine regarding his divinity; one thing broke it. And that was regret. Yes, for regret is a human characteristic, and a god cannot regret anything he does since he is omniscient in his knowledge, his perception, his control, and his desire. When I say regret, I mean that your grandfather, my father …. My mother informed me one day at noon during a harvest season long ago that the only thing my father had done and regretted—something he had regretted having done throughout his entire life, even to the point that it sometimes made him cry in her lap in moments of weakness—was having cut off part of his first wife’s finger when she had pointed it menacingly in his face. Everyone knew about the incident and used it as an example, but what no one knew—apart from my mother and me, and now you—was that my father regretted it, and that references to this incident continued to torment him. Meanwhile, it helped me by stripping him of that quality of divinity.

“On account of this too, I was eager to act in a different way toward you, my children. I had doubts, or rather, I was certain about my inability to enforce a strict upbringing like my father. At the same time, I was wary of imposing upon you an image of the divine father, as happened to me. So I was impartial, human, and friendly, as you have observed.

“I would practice with you my other half, my living, normal, human ‘I.’ Internally, though, I was and still am divided in two, Saleem. One half was content, obedient, and convinced of the holiness that my father represented, as well as committed to working now for the sake of the hereafter. The other half was
suspicious, rebellious, doubtful, human, and committed to the world. It loved laughter, women, wealth, poetry, rebellion, and sin. I would practice the first in the village, in the presence of my father, and the other there in Kirkuk, at work, with foreigners, or with the Germans, to be more precise. But with you, I was eager to be neutral and to avoid letting my fierce inner struggle affect you.

“Your grandfather was a great man, Saleem. But he may have been born in the wrong era. I loved him greatly, but I wish that I had found a way to be free of his control other than by being loyal to him in every detail. At the same time, there is another half of me, which you have no doubt noticed here and consider improper. I have let go of its reins, and I don’t make excuses for it, Saleem. I have set it free from its prison that lasted so long, allowing it complete freedom and liberty until it vomits up every repression. Or until I see where it takes me.

“But don’t ever think that my first half has died, or that it has abandoned its controlling and censuring role. Instead, I’m like someone who is on a vacation or taking a break after having long practiced a certain way of life, and who will resume that way of life one day. Indeed, I find that it is the first half who sometimes continues to dominate. It is he who uses the other half for his own purposes like this. It is he who pushed me toward the fateful adventure that carried me here. He rides that bridled other half and paves the way for him, all for the sake of fulfilling his obligation, his covenant, his oath of vengeance before your august grandfather.

“I don’t know if I’ve expressed this entangled nature in my soul very well, or if I have satisfied you with my answers and this explanation of mine. Or if I have disappointed your hopes. I don’t know if I have been a good father to you or the one you wanted.
Because my father, who kept me from pleasing myself, was the same one who kept me from thinking about pleasing others.

“Well, I’ll try now to sketch things out for you as they actually happened by telling you the story which brought me here. Or rather, the story of my arrival to this place.

“After your grandfather’s departure,” (he didn’t say his “death” or his “murder”) “I was in a state of the most intense conflict with myself. Your mother was the only one who realized this pain. But she continued to be just as you knew her: a magnificent woman who acted as a mother to everyone. I used to go to my father’s grave and cry over him there. I would recite the Qur’an for him to reassure him that I still had it all memorized, just as he had wanted. I would whisper to him, speaking with him, asking him questions, and feeling that he was answering me. I would confirm the covenant that I had made with him and my commitment to everything he wanted from me, especially my oath of vengeance. And would you believe that I didn’t dare look at his headstone, either? Instead, I would rub it with my hand and then kiss my palm. And when I would leave I would hear his voice calling me: ‘Listen, Noah!’ He would repeat his famous saying, and the mountain would echo it back: ‘If a dog barks at you, don’t bark at it; but if it bites you, bite it back! … bite it back! … it back! … it back! … back! … back!’

“I was away from my job in Kirkuk for more than two months. When I went, intending to offer my resignation, I learned that they had fired me for being gone so long and had appointed someone else. They gave me the rest of the money that I had earned along with a good severance payment.

“Then I went to my Kurdish friend, Kaka Azad, a man of great wealth and even greater sorrow. My relationship with him had become very strong during my years of working
there, given that I used to go to his restaurant to store my belongings and confide my secrets. He would often take me to his house, where he lived alone. We would stay up late, and I would spend the night there. In the morning, he would drop me off at work in his car.

“Azad has a long and bitter story too. To make a long story short, the government had killed his family and destroyed his village. He found it utterly demolished when he returned from one of the trips that he used to take to Iran and Turkey, smuggling both goods and people. So he too swore to take revenge. He doctored his identity card and settled in Kirkuk after opening a magnificent restaurant there. He used it to find out what was going on and get close to men in power, whom he would lead on gradually until they poured out information to him about themselves and what they knew. Azad would pass this information on to the rebels in the mountains. He would also use it to plan his own schemes.

“I used to talk with Azad about everything, and our friendship deepened to the point of brotherhood. With an oath on the Qur’an, we pledged our brotherhood to each other one dawn at the prayer niche in a mosque, and we each gave our new brother a hair from our mustaches. I don’t deny that in doing so I was still imitating my father in that he took a Kurd as his brother. Do you remember? Sheikh Abd al-Shafi, the one we visited for Istabraq’s treatment.

“My brother Azad taught me much. If your grandfather nourished my blood with the essential meaning of values such as dignity, manliness, and good morals, Azad poured them into my bones like cement and taught me how to practice them with a firm heart. He taught me the rigidity of stubbornness. He would dedicate each operation he undertook to the
soul of one member of his family, and when he had reached the last one, he would start over, in the same order, dedicating further operations to them. I also learned from him how to wear masks, to practice contradictory roles, and to perfectly embody different personalities to the degree that I confused myself with them.

“When I informed him of my covenant with my father, and of my oath to insert this bullet” (he took his keychain and shook the bullet in his fist) “into the anus of that fucker who was the cause of everything, Azad patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘I envy you because you know the face of your enemy. Your job is easy. You aren’t like me. I’m fighting an enormous, faceless octopus of an enemy: the men in power, in the party, in the army, and their supporters. Rest assured, you will fulfill your vow. You will also avenge your son who was killed in their war, together with the other sons of your village, one by one.’ I wished that my father could have heard us then. I wept, and we embraced.

“Afterward, we decided to relocate to Baghdad. He sold his establishment in Kirkuk, and together we opened a splendid restaurant between Saadun Street and Abu Nuwas Street. At the time, I told your mother that I was journeying to fulfill my oath, and we shared the following exchange. I said to her, ‘I have been pleased with you.’ She said to me, ‘And I, with you.’ She knew what an oath on the Qur’an meant. And she knew very well what my father had meant to me, he who had signified the same value and preeminence for her. I told her that I didn’t know how long I would be gone. I didn’t know where I would settle or where I would go. I didn’t know, while I was away, whether I would live with or marry other women, or whether I would die. If she wanted me to divorce her, I
would do it. Otherwise, let her forgive me for what I might do, or what I would be forced to do, or what would happen to me.

“She cried, of course, and said, ‘Do whatever you want. I don’t want a divorce from you. Your being my husband and the father of my children is an honor for me. You are my crowning glory, and I want you to be my husband in the afterlife too.’ She remained strong in her convictions and came to understand me. She even gave me strength and resolve by encouraging me and promising that she would take my place in managing the house and the family. She would beseech God on my behalf in her prayers. In exchange, she asked me to spare no effort in searching for you. I promised her, and then we bid each other farewell. She offered me her gold jewelry, but I told her that I had plenty of money, some of which I gave to her.

“Then I departed, like you, one dawn long ago, and I haven’t since gotten in touch with her. What’s more, I haven’t even been concerned with my promise to ask about and search for you. That couldn’t really interest me.

“In Baghdad, our restaurant became a favorite among important officials, people of influence, and the rich. We would seduce them with our hospitality and our flattery. We acquired their friendship and facilitated their depravity. In this way, we learned much about them. At the same time, we inflicted upon them many carefully planned attacks. We gathered critical information, which Azad delivered to the rebels and the opposition. We learned that the young man I was searching for had been appointed as some kind of attaché in the Iraqi embassy in Spain. That’s how we began looking for some way to get me to him.

“Then it happened that some officials from the Ministry of Information came with a delegation of Spanish tourists to
our restaurant for dinner. I met Rosa, and one thing led to another. Wait a second, Saleem! Don’t think that I used Rosa and deceived her, even though, to be honest, I wouldn’t have hesitated to do that. I’ve done much worse in the company of my brother Azad. But what happened to me was the coming together of my goal and my emotions, for I actually loved her, and she loved me. She is the only woman that I have loved and chosen by myself, for myself. As you know, your grandfather chose your mother for me, and the first time I met her was on our wedding night. My love for your mother is strong, but it isn’t the typical love between a woman and a man. How can I explain it to you? I mean, we were a very successful couple, but we weren’t passionate lovers. As for Rosa, I fell in love with her and chose her purely out of my own desire. There were many things that brought us together. And so it came about that she undertook all the arrangements for my coming here. She spoke with the Spanish embassy and the immigration office, she signed the documents and the required guarantees, and she paid the fees for everything, including the flight here.